Comma-sense punctuation

FORMAL REFERENCE:
Thomas, Lewis. "Comma-sense punctuation." Writer 114, no. 2 (February 2001): 10. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 26, 2011).

RELEVANT SECTIONS: All

SUMMARY:

This article, from a writer’s magazine, puts down an onslaught against exclamation marks. Quote:

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

Further: “A single exclamation point in a poem, no matter what else the poem has to say, is enough to destroy the whole work.”

There is no data or research to back this up, but this subject, after all, is largely qualitative. This article was published in a writer’s magazine, and the other descriptions of punctuation in the article were accurate and helpful—this article was intended to be helpful to other writers. This fact makes the mention all the more interesting: writers are told by other writers to avoid punctuation marks, often for quite heartfelt reasons.

ASSESSMENT:
This article is a reprint of a section of Medusa and the Snail from 1979, by the same author. I am choosing not to cite that reference, because the context of this being published in a writer’s magazine is more important than a book.

Lewis Thomas is definitely an accomplished writer and author. He won a National Book Award in 1974 and his articles have appeared in pretty much every respected larger medium (NYT, SciAm, The Atlantic, Harpers). He was a professor of pediatric research at the U of M and was dean of Yale Medical School. So, his view would represent an academic perspective.

REFLECTION:

I will use this as the strongest example of the case being made against the use of exclamation marks, noting that if this is the case, it will need actual research to back it up—and if this sentiment is wrong, there’s a huge linguistic opportunity in the use of exclamation marks.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

exclamation mark, dismissal